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IDERA SQL Diagnostic Manager for SQL Server vs SCOM comparison

 

Comparison Buyer's Guide

Executive SummaryUpdated on Jan 23, 2025

Review summaries and opinions

We asked business professionals to review the solutions they use. Here are some excerpts of what they said:
 

Categories and Ranking

IDERA SQL Diagnostic Manage...
Ranking in Event Monitoring
15th
Average Rating
8.0
Reviews Sentiment
7.4
Number of Reviews
9
Ranking in other categories
Database Development and Management (13th)
SCOM
Ranking in Event Monitoring
3rd
Average Rating
7.8
Reviews Sentiment
6.8
Number of Reviews
83
Ranking in other categories
Network Monitoring Software (14th)
 

Mindshare comparison

As of May 2026, in the Event Monitoring category, the mindshare of IDERA SQL Diagnostic Manager for SQL Server is 3.4%, up from 1.3% compared to the previous year. The mindshare of SCOM is 9.9%, up from 7.8% compared to the previous year. It is calculated based on PeerSpot user engagement data.
Event Monitoring Mindshare Distribution
ProductMindshare (%)
SCOM9.9%
IDERA SQL Diagnostic Manager for SQL Server3.4%
Other86.7%
Event Monitoring
 

Featured Reviews

reviewer2317098 - PeerSpot reviewer
Assistant at a tech services company with 1,001-5,000 employees
Offers effective monitoring of resources but lacks the ability to connect to an AWS instance and write custom queries.
We use it mainly for monitoring, including CPU, memory, and disk space, and for troubleshooting purposes We've set up alerts to notify us when performance deviates from the baseline we've configured for each resource. So, whenever that happens, we get an alert and can investigate immediately. So,…
AK
Assistant Manager at SMS group GmbH
Have integrated effective monitoring and seamless alerting with improved visualization capabilities
The most valuable feature of SCOM is its monitoring capability, and we have integrated SCOM with Grafana, which is a dashboarding tool. We have implemented and integrated this to create dashboarding of the SCOM monitoring system for the database, SQL, and the Linux servers we have configured in SCOM. We have created separate dashboarding for it, and the monitoring and creating rules and monitors in the management servers and management packs that SCOM provides are very useful for us. The alerting mechanism of SCOM has benefited our operations because we have modified the thresholds as per our internal requirements. We have configured threshold modifications for the CPU, memory, and especially for disk space. For routine disk space usage on the system, we have provided a separate threshold configuration.

Quotes from Members

We asked business professionals to review the solutions they use. Here are some excerpts of what they said:
 

Pros

"Overall, it has allowed us to do more with database management and run more databases on a given server, because we're able to isolate issues quicker and take the proactive steps necessary to correct them."
"There are several monitoring tools, but IDERA SQL Diagnostic Manager is actually better than other competitors."
"Ability to identify bottlenecks, deadlocks and slow running queries and run monthly and daily reports."
"The most valuable features are disk space projections for planning, and also the Snapshotting ability, to look back in time, to see what was going on the server at a particular time."
"The best part of SQL DM is the ability to customize alerts and counters. This allows our team to find an issue then alert on the issue at a granular level."
"Monitors and alerts on our mission critical instances in real-time on a 24/7 basis."
"One of the things that it is used for is to detect anything that could possibly cause our systems not to function well, and it has helped us to determine that before anything has actually happened."
"We're able to diagnose issues prior to their actually becoming issues. Without the alerting, we wouldn't have a clue as to what was going to happen. With the alerting, it gives us a heads-up that a specific threshold has been met, and we need to take specific action."
"The System Center 2012 R2 is really powerful, all products work great together, is not so expensive anymore, easy to license, and can cover from end to end (Networking, Hardware layer, OS, App and services, ports, etc.)."
"The monitoring features are the most valuable. We have seen a major benefit from that so far."
"I like the historical reporting of observer metrics, and it's a fairly user-friendly solution."
"The solution's reporting engine has given me detailed information on which applications or services I've either failed or about to fail in terms of the predictive makeup on Azure cloud."
"We heavily rely on SCOM as our pro-active monitoring tool, preventing various problems and resolving issues quickly with the informative detail raised in SCOM alerts, which assists our department in being pro-active in resolving issues with servers and services rather than reactive."
"The ease of deployment, especially on Windows platforms, is valuable."
"The most valuable feature of SCOM is real-time alerts."
"This product allows me to measure the level of availability of services and detect errors in them."
 

Cons

"One thing I'd like to see is the ability to view the execution plan and have the system automatically recommend potential query optimizations, especially at the query level."
"We don't find that it helps us with performance monitoring and diagnostics. We find that SentryOne does that better. Also, in terms of alerts, we had to customize them dramatically so that we didn't get alerted on every little thing."
"Scalability is what I mentioned earlier, regarding room for improvement. It doesn't seem to scale out to an environment as large as ours, with just a single monitoring server."
"I would absolutely love to create customized dashboards but, unfortunately, they don't provide me the information that I need to create the report. The report I need is the detail or the transaction detail that's happening on those Snapshots. I'd like to be able to go back through time and search for things. I don't have that functionality, which is very disappointing. That's pretty bad and frustrating because I could query it and find out so much information about what's hitting my environment and when, but instead, they want control over it and to not give me that information. So it's encrypted. I can't pull it out and that is really bothersome."
"With basic SQL training in my history, I've found at times I needed to Google SQL counters, for example, to understand what was occurring or how to configure SQL DM to be useful."
"I don't have that functionality, which is very disappointing. That's pretty bad and frustrating because I could query it and find out so much information about what's hitting my environment and when, but instead, they want control over it and to not give me that information."
"It would helpful if SQL DM could mark when changes are made within the program."
"I'm going to do an upgrade which may resolve my issues, but one area for improvement is its ability to handle the amount of data that we collect with it. We're likely one of the largest installations, with over 300 servers being collected with this product, and sometimes there are gaps. That would really be my only concern, in terms of how the data is collected and stored, for consistency."
"It would be a much better product if Microsoft provided management packs with the product."
"They can focus more on cloud monitoring instead of on-premise monitoring. We should be able to monitor cloud-related applications."
"Then there is also an issue with capacity and limited space. That is something that needs to be improved."
"It's not straightforward, SCOM is relatively noisy out of the box, so time is required to tailor the alerting, adjusting threshold triggers and over-riding alerts that are not required to ensure alerts captured are relevant and require action."
"It lacks certain details that other products do better, like granular access and better application monitoring."
"The console was not stable at the early versions of 2007 product, opening multiple consoles might cause a crash, and the web console might hang when opening multiple sessions as well."
"I feel that the stability of the tool has room for improvement and I would like to see that in the next version."
"I would like to see them improve their network monitoring."
 

Pricing and Cost Advice

"We were upgraded to Premium Support without their actually asking us, when we were quoted. Then I asked for Standard Support and that they had to re-quote us that. But they don't do that by default. They upcharge you by default, which I didn't think was very nice, without even asking."
"The pricing is reasonable, it's comparable with the competitors."
"SCOM is very cheap because it's included in the license for the System Center suite, which is around $8,400 per CAL."
"We have to pay for a license and the price is fine for us."
"Our Enterprise Agreement includes the price."
"It is the cheapest product available in the market."
"SCOM is part of the System Center suite and I am satisfied with the pricing."
"We have an EA with Microsoft, and it comes as part of the EA."
"We have an enterprise agreement that includes this product as part of it."
"It is more expensive than the competition."
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Top Industries

By visitors reading reviews
Comms Service Provider
9%
Construction Company
8%
Healthcare Company
8%
Outsourcing Company
8%
Financial Services Firm
14%
Government
9%
Manufacturing Company
8%
Computer Software Company
7%
 

Company Size

By reviewers
Large Enterprise
Midsize Enterprise
Small Business
By reviewers
Company SizeCount
Small Business3
Midsize Enterprise5
Large Enterprise4
By reviewers
Company SizeCount
Small Business16
Midsize Enterprise22
Large Enterprise54
 

Questions from the Community

Ask a question
Earn 20 points
What do you like most about SCOM?
The tool helps to monitor Windows servers. It offers alerts from a central location.
What is your experience regarding pricing and costs for SCOM?
I am not aware of the exact pricing as it is managed by my supervisor. As an academic institution, we receive substantial discounts.
What needs improvement with SCOM?
We believe that the dashboarding in SCOM needs to be improved or enhanced because it is not too expressive in reporting. We can work on deploying new ways of viewing things and modifying visualizat...
 

Also Known As

IDERA SQL DM, IDERA SQL Diagnostic Manager
System Center Operations Manager, SCOM 2012
 

Overview

 

Sample Customers

Padnos, University of Notre Dame, D4, Infeon Technologies, Chevron, LC Waikiki, Sisters of Saint Francis Health Services, Seattle Cancer Care Alliance, CVE, Colorado State University, St. Charles, Chaucer PLC, 1-800-Flowers, Ancoris, Money Management, National Opinion Research Center, California Department of Health, Plexus; Aviva, Burlington Northern Santa Fe, CBS, Comcast, Google, Merck, Regions Financial, Schneider Electric, Tata Consultancy Services, Verizon Communications, Zurich Financial Services
Dialog Telekom
Find out what your peers are saying about IDERA SQL Diagnostic Manager for SQL Server vs. SCOM and other solutions. Updated: April 2026.
893,438 professionals have used our research since 2012.